• Leadership
• Work ethic and persistence
• Creativity
• Relationships and conflict resolution
These findings are not just common to the professional world. In The Role of Education in Building Soft Skills, researchers Alan D. Greenberg and Andrew H. Nilssen (2014) find that when teachers, administrators, parents, and students are asked about what qualities are most important, problem solving caps the list, with 65 percent finding it very important, followed by collaboration (56 percent), persistence (50 percent), creativity (37 percent), academic knowledge (33 percent), and leadership skills (35 percent).
The question that naturally evolves from this is, How do we move from knowing there is a need for cognitive engagement to ensuring our education system can deliver on it?
Policy and Assessment Systems Changes
These demands for student competencies are shaping national and international assessments. The Central Committee of the Communist Party states that education in China must begin to “emphasize sowing students’ creativity and practical abilities over instilling an ability to achieve certain test scores and recite rote knowledge” (Zhao, 2006). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, n.d.), whose focus is to enhance economic progress and world trade, defines global competence as the ability to evaluate global and culture challenges from many viewpoints through a critical lens and comprehend how perceptions shape differences, so to effectively communicate with others from various backgrounds. The foundation of this global competence resonates on well-developed analytical and critical-thinking skills—interpreting the meaning of information, approaching problems logically, and evaluating the validity and reliability of information. To this end, the organization established the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa), a cognitive assessment program to measure understanding (along with analytical and critical thinking) while engaged in real-world problem solving on international issues.
Similarly, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (https://parcc-assessment.org) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (www.smartbalanced.org) are designing rigorous assessments to evaluate college and career readiness through critical-thinking tasks measuring analysis skills instead of rote memorization. Stanford professor emerita and president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute Linda Darling-Hammond (2012) avows:
Performance tasks ask students to research and analyze information, weigh evidence, and solve problems relevant to the real world, allowing students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in an authentic way. The Smarter Balanced assessment system uses performance tasks to measure skills valued by higher education and the workplace—critical thinking, problem solving, and communication—that are not adequately assessed by most statewide assessments today. (p. 2)
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA; 2015) also transfers the focus from remembering and recitation to higher-level thinking, as shown in one of the ESSA major areas directed toward access to learning opportunities focused on higher-order-thinking skills. Authors Channa M. Cook-Harvey, Linda Darling-Hammond, Livia Lam, Charmaine Mercer, and Martens Roc (2016) write:
Rather than the rote-oriented education that disadvantaged students have regularly received, which prepares them for the factory jobs of the past, ESSA insists that states redesign education systems to reflect 21st-century learning. The new law establishes a set of expectations for states to design standards and assessments that develop and measure high-order thinking skills for children and provides related resources for professional learning. (p. 1)
The evidence of the need for developing a thinking-based culture in all classrooms is clear. With all this in mind, let’s examine how this book will help you build critical-thinking skills in your students and what it will take to make a thinking culture an everyday part of your classroom.
About This Book
This book will support educators as they seek to embed critical thinking into instruction by providing fifty easy-to-implement strategies that lead to high levels of student engagement that deepen learning. States, districts, and even individual schools all have valid ideas and systems in place they believe will serve student interests, but ultimately, it comes down to teachers.
As researchers Robert J. Marzano and Michael D. Toth (2014) write:
If we hope to move students to these higher levels of skills and cognition, it’s imperative that we equip teachers with the “how,” those essential teaching strategies that will scaffold students to problem-solve and make decisions in real-world scenarios with less teacher direction. (p. 11)
Seventy-six percent of educators state they don’t have sufficient knowledge and training to nurture creative problem solving (Adobe Systems, 2018). Similarly, in a large-scale study of teachers applying for National Board Certification, a key element differentiating those who earned and didn’t earn certification was their ability to plan curriculum that transitions students from understanding to deeper learning outcomes (Smith, Baker, Hattie, & Bond, 2008). Possessing the ability to design tasks with high-cognitive-level outcomes is an advanced teaching skill.
This book will help you enhance your ability to design these high-cognitive tasks in the following ways.
• Chapter 1 fully defines critical thinking and cognitive engagement, details ways to involve students in deep-level processing strategies, and provides guidelines on establishing a thinking classroom culture.
• Chapter 2 focuses on Bloom’s taxonomy revised (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), describing each level of its cognitive processes while also providing numerous classroom examples to highlight how you engage students at the levels most likely to engage their critical-thinking skills.
• Chapter 3 establishes the criteria for this book’s strategies organization. It also clarifies the three supporting components of the strategies that produce the engagement necessary to allow critical thinking to happen.
• Chapters 4–7 contain the fifty strategies for critical thinking at the heart of this book. Chapter 4 provides strategies that emphasize the Understand level of Bloom’s taxonomy revised (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001); chapter 5 highlights strategies at the Analyze level; the strategies in chapter 6 align with the Evaluate level; and chapter 7 provides strategies that produce the highest and most demanding kinds of thinking, the Create level. These higher levels on Bloom’s revised taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) challenge students to think critically and problem solve, better preparing them for life outside of school.
• Chapter 8 wraps up this book by outlining several key aspects of a thinking classroom culture. The knowledge in this chapter is the cement that will hold all the strategy bricks together.
Each chapter ends with a series of Discussion Questions and a Take Action section that provides activities you can use to put this book’s ideas and strategies to work.
When you consider the vital importance of thinking skills to students’ future prospects, the need for all teachers to cultivate a classroom culture high in cognitive engagement is clear. If you’re ready to make this essential transition, you need only turn